All posts tagged phone plans

Sprint is launching a new prepaid wireless plan. It just may be the worst deal ever.

The plan will be available under a new brand simply named Sprint Prepaid. For $45 a month, subscribers buying the Smart plan get unlimited voice and text but no cellular data. All Internet surfing on the plan has to be done over Wi-Fi.

Sprint says it is targeting people who are looking for savings. But people don’t have to look very hard to find a better price. Read More »

AT&T has ended a promotion to pay T-Mobile customers up to $450 to switch services, stopping the payout offer after less than a month.

The carriers have been sniping at each other in the wake of a relentless campaign by T-Mobile targeted its larger rival’s customers, a move that has prompted countermeasures from AT&T such as newspaper ads targeting what it criticized as the inadequate size and speed of the T-Mobile network. Read More »

The days of worrying about minutes ticking away on your cell phone plan are nearly gone.

As of today, AT&T is dropping the availability of its old plans for new smartphone subscribers, and all of the remaining plans include unlimited calling and texting with the exception of one. The three other major U.S. carriers — Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — now only offer unlimited voice and messaging to new customers. Read More »

Ask any American about his or her phone plan and you’ll likely get an ardent response. With so many choices on the market – and so much confusion as to what’s best – you can’t help but wonder if you’re getting shortchanged.

The Journal recently asked readers on Digits and Facebook to tell us what they like or dislike about their phone plans. We received a few hundred responses. Not surprisingly, the sentiment was mostly negative. None of the major U.S. carriers – AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile – escaped complaints.

After the jump you’ll find a selection of reader responses (lightly edited for clarity). Also, please check out the Journal’s new Wireless Savings Calculator, which lets you can compare the cheapest smartphone plans from each of the four top companies. Tell us what you think at phoneplan@wsj.com. Read More »

Just in time for the Journal’s new Wireless Savings Calculator, Verizon Wireless today quietly added one more option to its Share Everything phone plans — a lower-tier, a 500-megabyte data plan that is $10 cheaper with a smartphone. The move comes only days after AT&T introduced a 300 MB option that costs half as much as its 1 GB monthly data allotment. Read More »

In five easy steps, you can compare all the smartphone plans offered by the four major U.S. carriers: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. Just plug in your preferences for voice, text and data and the calculator will display the cheapest plans available at each of the four carriers. The tool includes roughly 700 different plan combinations.

If you’re searching for a way out of your two-year cellphone contract without paying hundreds of dollars in fees, the contract itself is not a great place to look. It’s long, it’s complicated and the few loopholes it mentions aren’t useful to most people.

But there are a handful of tricks to wiggle out of a contract without taking a big hit to your wallet, though it will take some effort.

Early termination fees were designed to help wireless carriers recoup the discount they provide on phones. While those fees can run as high as $350, all the major phone companies cut back the cost depending on how long a customer is in a plan. For example, AT&T’s early termination fee for a smartphone starts at $325 and goes down by $10 every month.

Smartphones are supposed to make our lives easier by constantly connecting to the Internet. But figuring out how much data they will consume per month is no simple task.

It’s easy to count the number of text messages or add up voice minutes. But how many megabytes does it take to download a photo? How about to stream 30 minutes of music, or watch a 10-minute YouTube video?

Sounds impossible, right? Don’t despair. We have some tips to help you gauge your data consumption: Read More »

T-Mobile CEO John Legere, interviewed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in May

By Thomas Gryta and Nathalie Tadena

T-Mobile US Inc. unveiled a new program that allows customers to upgrade their phones as often as twice a year, as the carrier looks to differentiate itself from larger rivals.

At an event in New York City Wednesday, T-Mobile said its new Jump program enables customers to upgrade their phones when they want, up to twice a year, as soon as six months after enrolling for $10 a month per phone. The company said the new plan, which begins Sunday, protects against malfunction, damage, loss or theft of a phone.

The company also said its 4G LTE network now reaches 157 million people across the U.S., exceeding its midyear goal of reaching 100 million people.

T-Mobile US has been investing heavily in its network, which has fallen behind competitors that have been adding next-generation LTE technology for some time. Verizon Wireless has substantially finished covering its legacy network with the faster and more efficient technology. Read More »